Without a Traceroute

Day two of the HAIP festival was mostly lectures. Kiberpipa is putting together a video archive of all the lectures from the festival, so you can watch them for yourselves there, there’s also text explanations from the HAIP program here.

The first talk was by a woman named Eleonora Oreggia. She has an idea for something she calls “Virtual Entity” which would be a universal, shared, collaborative metadata system for files. She wanted the system to be decentralized, automatically updating to take into account new revisions of the file, and allowing for people to comment on it. She gave an example of the problems with current, static metadata systems: if she uploads an early version of an artwork, without filling in all the metadata, and somebody downloads that file, then later when she finished the file and fills out the rest of the metadata, then anyone who downloaded the file earlier would have bad, incomplete/out of date metadata.
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After the exhibition at the art gallery, most people went over to Kiberpipa (“Cyberpipe”, in English), the hacklab/group organizing the festival. Kiberpipa is almost as cool as C-base, but in a very different way. Where C-base has a very gritty, cyberpunk aesthetic, Kiberpipa is much more upscale, receiving funding from the European Union and some Slovenian cultural foundations. It’s located in the basement of Caffé Metropol, a nice little coffee bar. Kiberpipa has wooden floors, comfortable couches and a really cool mini-museum on the history of computing. They have working examples, and dissected components, of some important early computers: the Commodore 64, the Amiga 1000, the Apple IIe, the NeXT cube of the type that ran the world’s first web server.

There were several art exhibits set up at Kiberpipa as well. HT Gold was a glitched-up version of an old C64 video game called Hat Trick. Anyone who wanted to could mess with the joystick, which would produce different interesting colors and sounds. Another piece called System Cassio:Pia reminded me of a Dalek; it had all sorts of blinking lights and TV screens displaying short clips from movies and music videos. A project I thought had the potential to be really awesome was a thing called “Culture Robot”. This involved a projected map of Ljubljana (with “free” or “open” cultural spaces highlighted), and these little insect-like robots built from a CD base with wire antennas attached to collision sensors. The whole thing was surrounded by a rectangular wood base with other movable obstacles, and the robots would roam around, bouncing off the walls and the obstacles. It was cool-looking, and I liked the robots, but it would have been about 200% cooler if the robots had actually interacted with the map in some way. As it was, the map was just a superfluous background.

Perhaps as a result of over-exposure to all the glitch art, my camera started going on the fritz, producing some rather interesting glitches(-art?) of its own. I’ve included a few of the (totally unedited!) cooler examples below, but it was actually really irritating to never be sure if a picture I took was going to come out or not. I guess in the days before digital photography, that’s how every shot was. Regardless, the photos of System Cassio:Pia and Hat Trick below were not taken by me but rather by the festival photographer, Tea. More actually-good photos can be found on the Kiberpipa photo archive.

The other big thing on the first night was the arrival of the Pirate Bay bus. For reasons of pure awesomeness, some of the people associated with the world’s largest bittorrent site (and its mother project Piratbyrån, the Bureau of Piracy) have decided to cruise around Europe in a modified Stockholm city bus as an “experience laboratory”. I really enjoyed the Pirate Bay/Piratbyrån people. For one thing, they took themselves about a third as seriously as anyone else at the festival (with the possible exception of Monochrom…I’ll get to them). It’s not that the other participants weren’t fun, it’s just that they mostly saw themselves as real artists with serious or semi-serious artistic endeavors. The Pirate Bay people seemed to be in it almost entirely for the lulz.

They were several hours late arriving at the festival, having just driven in from Bolzano, Italy. A slogan painted on the back of the bus cautioned “Slow on the road; fast on the net”. After arriving, one of the guys from the bus performed a “traditional folk dance of the Kopimi [read: copy-me] people,” which involved wearing a colorful knitted outfit and dancing randomly waving a “ceremonial sampling wand” to a repetitive, sample-looped piece of music. One person I talked to complained that this performance was just thrown together from some crap they already had on this bus, which I thought was sort of the point.

The Piratbyrån performance brought to a close the first day of the festival.

I spent the first couple nights in Ljubljana at the “#1 hippest hostel in the world” as determined by Lonely Planet. Since I’ve been stubbornly avoiding carrying any tourist guidebooks on this trip, I was unaware of this when I checked in. I just picked the closest hostel to the train station marked on the map I got from the tourist office. The place actually was pretty cool. It’s located inside a renovated military prison; local artists decorated many of the rooms, and there’s a small art gallery on the ground floor. They offered a daily tour, which I never got around to taking. I imagine in high-season it would be quite the place the be, but in November it was mostly empty. However, the lack of guests didn’t cause them to lower their prices, or stop them nickle-and-diming you with €4/hour internet access and overpriced drinks at the bar. These are the things you can do when you’re the hippest hostel on the face of the Earth, I suppose.

I did meet another guest, an American from Hollywood. He works for Jerry Bruckheimer’s production company, scouting new scripts, or books that can be made into scripts and then finding “punch-up” writers to improve the scripts or rework the books into scripts. Shockingly, despite this description he was not at all intolerable! Going to school in LA for 4 years, I’ve run into my share of “Hollywood people” before, and usually despise them within minutes. This guy seemed genuinely open, curious and friendly; he wasn’t arrogant or trying to impress me, and didn’t even tell me what he did until I asked. We went to the Slovenian National Gallery together (it’s free on Sundays) and he seemed genuinely interested in my (admittedly minimal) knowledge of different art styles, and the classical mythology / Christian iconography depicted therein.

Monday, I went to the opening event of the Hack, Act, Interact, Progress (HAIP) festival at an art gallery. It was very busy, with a variety of international artists and interested onlookers. There was free wine and little cracker/bread snacks. The local media was also out in force with photographers and television cameramen wandering around. The TV cameras were particularly intrusive. I was pleased that the media thought a tech-art event was worth covering, but I got kind of sick of the camera guy with a bright light following me around, apparently trying to get footage of somebody “experiencing” the art or something. Every time I turned to look at him, he gestured at me to keep looking at whatever I was looking at before. Finally, I pulled out my own camera and snapped a photo of him.

Observing the observer

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Immediately after the Ubuntu release party, I took an overnight train from Berlin to Munich with a transfer to Ljubljana, Slovenia (I pronounce it “Loob-lee-yana” and nobody ever corrected me) very early the next morning. I had wanted to spend longer in Berlin. For some reason, in my mind, this festival was always at the end of November, but when I checked the day after arriving in Berlin, I realized it actually started on the 3rd.

Somewhere between Munich and Ljubljana

It’s interesting how the the incidental vagaries of how you feel at a particular moment can affect your decision-making. Because I was booking the train to Ljubljana just after my lengthy train/train/bus/airport floor/plane trip to Berlin, I sprang for the extra €20 to have a fold-out bed instead of just a seat thinking “At least I’ll get a good night’s sleep”, not really factoring in that I’d have about a week’s worth of perfectly good nights in Berlin and feel much less burnt-out by the time I was getting on the train. Had I booked the train the night before I was leaving, I probably wouldn’t have gotten the bed. Nevertheless, I appreciated me-from-one-week-ago’s generosity. German trains are quite nice, and mine was very comfortable. It even had an electrical plug so I could use my laptop without running down the battery.

The only problem with this plan was a little boy in the compartment across from mine who was way, way too interested in watching me playing little games and watching movies on my computer. I tried to say ‘hi’ but he seemed only to speak German. His wide-eyed staring was starting to creep me out, so I tried to dissuade his interest by opening up the most boring program I could think of: a text editor. I tried to work on composing my first quarterly report to the Watson Foundation. But when he maintained his rapt interest in the face of a screen of text, I put the computer away and switched to a book.

The Munich train station seemed nice enough. This was actually the third time in my life I’ve transited through Munich without ever seeing anything of the city. Since it was about 6:30 am, I avoided sampling the beer Munich is famous for and instead bought a bottle of “still” water for the five-hour train ride to Ljubljana.

I put “still” in quotes because true non-carbonated bottled water doesn’t really exist in Germany. The water “mit gas” is quite bubbly, while even the “still” water is very lightly carbonated. I remember once a few years ago asking a German woman why they don’t have actual still water, you know, like tap water? Her reaction was one of disgust, “Eww, to drink such flat water, it would be like…well, do you have in English, the expression ‘like licking the sweat from the balls of a dog’?” I assured her that while no such colloquial phrase existed in English, the meaning was exceedingly clear.

The ride to Ljubljana was very scenic, passing through sections of the Austrian alps. I got most of the way through “Marching Powder” a totally insane true story about the craziest prison in the world, and a great read I was given in a Berlin hostel. My first impression upon arriving in Slovenia was how clean, developed and modern it seemed. I knew basically nothing about Slovenia prior to arriving, but I suppose I had sort of been expecting it to conform to some composite stereotype of a post-communist Balkan state. If anything, the opposite is true. Ljubljana is a charming, modern capital city (and actually slightly more expensive than Berlin). Budapest has fantastic architecture and history, but also a kind of eastern greyness that wore on me over time; none of that is present in “the LJ” as some of the younger residents refer to it.

I really really need to get caught up to the point where I’m finally writing about the city/country that I’m actually in again. I swear I’m going to get caught up in the next day or so and get back on a frequent posting schedule. So I may give my week in Berlin shorter shrift than it really deserves.

The big thing that I came to Berlin for is C-base. C-base is amazing. It’s basically the hacker mecca. It’s been in its current location since the late 1980s, which in the computer world is practically an eternity. Unlike many of the other hacklabs I’ve visited which are precariously located in squats, or part of some larger social center, C-base is its own entity. Registered as a non-profit corporation, it collects money monthly from some 400-500 dues-paying members.

C-base is tricky to photograph. If I use a flash, it washes out and does a very poor job of conveying the dark, cyberpunk aesthetic of the place, and it’s too dark to really photograph properly without the flash. At least, for my crappy camera. It looks kind of like the inside of a laser-tag arena, only without the smoke machine; and most of the neon blinking things actually do something. There’s strange aliens, and circuit boards all over the walls. Apparently some of the original founders’ mother/mainboards now adorn the “nerd room” in the basement. This room is off-limits to non-members unless escorted by a member. When I emailed, the C-base guys generously found an American ex-pat member to show me around. (more…)